collection1b

April 09, 2016

The Missing X-Patents

, and one x-patent restored.

[Posted on L&P on July 21, 2007.] And last but not least, here’s one of the disappeared ones. As you can see from the story told by John H. Lienhard in “The Lost Patents”, in his online column, The Engines Of Our Ingenuity, most of the x-patents did not survive, and the attempt to restore them has not been altogether successful. Well, I am pleased to announce here that at least one more of those lost x-patents shall be restored, and a fountain pen patent, no less. A fellow pen collector and contributor to the pen discussion on the various pen message boards, Deborah Alicen, was instrumental in finding this lost x-patent, and I owe her a debt of gratitude for sharing her discovery with me. Her name will appear in the introduction in the next volume of my patent book, and the illustration itself will appear at the head of the chapter of US patents. There are a few fountain pen patents that are earlier than this one, but there are no surviving patent images for those, either, so by default, this one is the earliest surviving US pen patent image, so far. Seeing as there are no patent images online, yet, I can’t include a link to this patent, so for this one, sadly, you’ll have to wait for the book. I can’t give everything away.George Kovalenko..

P.S. This series of posts illustrates the kinds of things that can be found in the pen patents, and the type of research that is made possible, if one has a chronological list of all the US pen and pencil and ink and inkwell, &c., patents, designs, and trademarks to work with. But before I go, here’s a parting challenge. There are about 11,325 patents, designs, and trademarks from the years 1799 to 1957, and I have looked at all of them, except for the few that are not online. So who will be next in line to look at all of them? Mind you, you’ll have to look at and read every single one of them in order to find all the interesting ones, and to discover all the structures, patterns, and connections between them, and to make your own interpretations, and come to your own conclusions.